Archive for the 'max/msp' Category

In December and January I recorded all the commissioned works from my research project on a CD, and a separate CD with improvisations, together with Peter Tornquist. Mats Claesson, from the Academy of Music is the sound engineer on these productions, and also does most of the mixing. We work together to find the best cuts, and then he does the final mixing.

January 27 Diemo Schwarz came to the Academy and did a 3-hours recording session, improvising along his beautiful electronics. It was really cool to do this recording with him, and to make a suitable setup for CataRT, sending out the lines from the electronics separately. I used all my guitar gear, especially playing around with my Angel Dust-pedal (distortion and noise), which I borrowed from John Hegre.

Mats Claesson is editing and mixing/remixing the favourite parts of the recording this week.

The stage was set for an exciting encounter between two live electronic musicians of international standing at Sound of Mu on Tuesday January 25.

Diemo Schwarz from IRCAM held a workshop in advanced synthesis and signal processing at NOTAM in the end of January.

Diemo Schwarz is one of the leading figures within the live electronics field, and he has developed a number of signal processing tools, including Max/MSP patches such as FTM and CataRT. It was a pleasure for me to be able to play a concert with him again.

The concert was organized by me in collaboration with NOTAM, and Cato Langnes was the sound engineer. In addition to improvisations by Diemo and me we

From the concert at Sound of Mu in Oslo

both played a solo piece each. I played Thomas Dahl’s piece No Reason Aftermath. It was a great atmosphere at the venue.

Diemo is using the iPad as a control function for CataRT, as well as a pressure-sensitive MIDI-controller which controls the dynamics. It works so well with the iPad. He can play it like a separate instrument, away from the computer, using the accelerometer.

At the concert, Alexander Refsum Jensenius and I performed our piece Transformation, exploring improvisation in time and space during this concert that also featured pieces by Henrik Hellstenius, Thomas Dahl and an improvisation by Victoria Johnson and Peter Tornquist.

Alexander and I have been collaborating for several years on exploration of various types of technologies for musical expression. The piece currently presented is based on video analysis using modules from the Musical Gestures Toolbox in Jamoma and CataRT.

By moving inside a seemingly empty space, I have slowly explored a sonic landscape of thousands of short fragments of various violin sounds. The space thus becomes a musical entity in itself, a space that the violinist both controls and interacts with at the same time. What seemed to be an empty space at first, is left as a sonic space in our memory when the piece ends.

For Victoria Counting IV we used the new visual ideas from the workshop (see previous posts), and added a new direction, made mainly by Henrik Hellstenius. The new direction made me very busy on stage, at first sitting on a low stool, after a while started to run when playing, and looking for my lost photos when at the same time looking at all the photos from my life.

December 9&10 I worked with Alexander Refsum Jensenius in video-analysis and Catart again. The theme for the workshop was spatialisation. Alexander had recently been to Denmark working with Dan Overholt on the same issue so we tired out a new patch called grid they had worked on together when he was i Denmark. We used spatialisation using V-bap and video-analysis tracking my position at the floor. And then we managed to let the sound follow me when I walked around in the space. We also did an experiment in Catatrt using homogeneous sounds like pizzicato and instead of the preset chop we tried silence segmentation. That did nor work that well because the grain got a sot of delay (The patch s looking for silent zones) The evaluation of that preset is that I can not control the sound with my movements.

We also tried to use 2 sound corpus’s in Catart and one grid-patch and reverb for maximum expression and sound in the room. That worked well. I think we are getting nearer what we want to achieve using the space. The next theme will be how to start with an empty space record sound in Catart in realtime and then interact with the sound in the space.

I have also participated in the conference Sensious Knowledge at Solstrand, Bergen (September 23-25) and made a presentation in International Contemporary Music days in Gothenburg (October 2-3 rd 2009) During the seminar at Solstrand we heard many interesting presentations, but the most interesting thing was for me to meet other artist outside my field. In the conference in Gothenburg was about the boundaries of interpretation and practical Artistic research and was very interesting for my project. I did the presentation together with Henrik Hellstenius. I also played some excerpts of Victoria Counts II during the presentation.

Video-analysis and CatArt

Having the second workshop together with Alexander R Jensenius (October 5-6) has given me more understanding about how CatArt works. Again using a fairly big space at the Academy (4x4m) gave us the possibility to go through many different parameters in CatArt to evaluate what works the best. In this space it works best if the grains are fairly evenly distributed like in preset 2:Spectral centroid periodicity Loudness. Using this preset I am then able to use the whole space to interact. It also works best if the sounds we use are not too brutal and strong. (crush does not work so well as pizzicato and flageolets)

Working with open form

October 7-9 we had rehearsals for the open form festival in November practising Else Storesunds piece Liquid Vapour. The piece is based on schemes and graphs from a research book about water. We use these schemes as a starting point and ground for improvisations where the theme is water.

I arranged in cooperation NMH an international workshop on hyperimprovisation where the theme was; own practise with real-time improvisation and augmented instruments. The seminar took place at NMH during Ultima festival from 15-17 September 2009.

I have during the conference met some of the best international performers working in my field. I made a presentation of my project during this conference and got a lot of important feedback. I had the possibility to discuss musical, aesthetical and technical questions more informally with the participants during the seminar. To put the music, improvisation own practise and interaction with the computer as the main topic has been missing in many conferences such as NIME and ICMC etc.

I hope to arrange this seminar on annual basis and refine and sharpen the topic.

I have got written feedback from the participants and this feedback will be important for forthcoming seminars.

August 24 and 25 I had a workshop with video-analysis together with Alexander R Jensenius. Based on his research he made patches which could track my movements in a room. I used the sound to interact with recorded material from the violin. We used a big space ar the Academy hanging a web-camera in the roof.
on photo Alexander with research and development on a HIGH level! More about this later.